Hoax: Blaming outsiders to build a power plant

The Washington Examiner attempts to blame outsiders for the protest against the proposed Desert Rock power plant. The article is void of the facts. It has always been Navajos living on the land who organized Dooda Desert Rock and are protesting. The Washington Examiner's article is a typical spin article for the energy company.

By Brenda Norrell

The latest hoax in the news comes from the Washington Examiner, which tries to place the blame for the protest against the Desert Rock power plant on outsiders. Don't be fooled by this article, it is actually the Navajos who live on the land in the area around Burnham, N.M., on the Navajo Nation, that have always been leading this protest and occupying their homeland.
The scam article is typical of the articles in efforts to ramrod polluting industries in remote Indian areas. Either the article is directly paid for by the power plant planners, the result of backdoor deals, or the authors and the Washington Examiner just don't know their facts.
If the authors were to actually go out to the land and talk with the Navajos who live there, they would write an entirely different story. They would discover that the 88 Navajo councilmen and Navajo President Joe Shirley, pushing for this power plant, receive the bulk of their salaries and expense dollars from the revenues from disease producing industries on the Navajo Nation: Coal, power plants and oil and gas industries.
The Navajos who live on the land are sick and tired, and sick and dying, from the coal mining, power plants, oil and gas wells and radioactive uranium tailings that are already there. They don't want another power plant and organized the longstanding local protest: Dooda (NO) Desert Rock.
Blaming the outside "greens" in the hoax article appears to be an easy fix for the energy company, but it is not. It just magnifies the last ditch efforts of the power plant makers attempting to profiteer from putting another dirty industry on Indian lands.
The assumption that a dirty, life-destroying power plant is the only way the Navajo Nation can make money is racist.
Don't expect the media to cover the Navajos who live on the land and protest this power plant and the other power plants strewn over this region. Grassroots Navajos, many living without running water, electricity and gas money to get to town, don't have public relations dollars to spin articles like this one.
Of course the Navajo Nation has those dollars. Yes, you guessed it, most of the revenues come from those filthy polluting industries.
The hoax article is at:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/55434227.html
Journalist Brenda Norrell lived on the Navajo Nation for 18 years, most of those years were in the Chuska Mountains, not far from the proposed site of the new power plant.